Reintroducing tilapia fry

[Russ Grant]

Greetings AP Friends!

I had 23 tilapia fry show up in my sump tank back in May. I removed the fry from the sump and eventually transferred them into a 50 gal FT inside. 22 have survived and are getting close to 2" and I would like to start a transition of these 22 fry into my AP system. My existing system is 275 gal tote - there are 45 tilapia in the AP FT that are close to one year old. I would like to get any advice on trying to introduce these fry into the AP system. I have several concerns about putting these fry into the AP FT, the first is that the fish currently in the AP system are grown and eat large pellets - the fry are eating flakes. I'm not sure how I'm going to feed the fry without having some type of separator in the AP FT to give the fry a fighting chance to get food (flakes most likely). I'm also not sure if the fry, even at this size won't end up getting eaten by the larger tilapia?

One other not so important question. One of the 22 tilapia fry is very dark, you can see him on the far right side of the photo. There are times that he actually looks black, although he does have the red highlights on his fins/tail. Any thoughts on why one sibling of 22 would be so different? (please ignore the large goldfish and two koi :)

Thanks!

[Russ Grant]

Thanks for the insight Randall, very helpful.